I think the politics taboo is one of the best things about Less Wrong.
Yes, it's also a frustrating thing, because politics is important and full of relevant examples about rationality. But if you think you have an insightful, rational point to say about politics that will not degenerate into a sprawling discussion with negative utility... you are probably wrong.
I like the idea of starting a Politics Open Thread if it means I won't see any more political comments elsewhere on LW. Also it would work as a nice experiment to convince libertines like you that encouraging political discussion isn't a good idea, or convince curmudgeons like me that it is.
I like the idea of starting a Politics Open Thread if it means I won't see any more political comments elsewhere on LW.
It won't. Instead, what will happen is that people will start attaching the mental labels of "Blue" and "Green" to other commenters, based on encounters in such a thread, and these labels will apply everywhere, and consequently distort the discussions and the voting on all topics.
I agree with thomblake that the original intent of the "Politics is the Mind-Killer" doctrine wasn't to ban politics (and even that post itself wasn't intended as official Overcoming Bias policy, just advice from Eliezer!), but I am also 100% with Raemon in endorsing the anti-politics norm that has subsequently developed.
But note that the norm itself, like most human norms, is not an absolute or rigid one, just a scale of increasing costs or penalties with increasing severity of "violations". It's always been okay to mention politics in a way that shows you "know what you're doing" (proof: I have); high-status people are allowed more leeway than the lower-status (except for the very highest-status individuals, on whom norms are often s...
It won't. Instead, what will happen is that people will start attaching the mental labels of "Blue" and "Green" to other commenters, based on encounters in such a thread, and these labels will apply everywhere, and consequently distort the discussions and the voting on all topics.
This. I can' tell you how grateful I am that I have no idea about the politics of most posters I'm familiar with.
Perhaps any forum for political discussions here should allow (force?) people to choose a secret identity (i.e., separate nickname) for use only there.
It won't. Instead, what will happen is that people will start attaching the mental labels of "Blue" and "Green" to other commenters, based on encounters in such a thread
I can already do this to many commenters based on their comments in the existing threads.
The problem is that the norm of the politics-ban is quite broad. Basically everything that the "Personal is Political" crowd would label political is swept in.
Not only is discussion of the latest maneuverings of Newt vs. Mitt prohibited, but discussion of democracy vs. authoritarianism, feminism, the purpose of juries, etc. are considered off limits by a vocal portion of LessWrong. I have no desire to debate whether Obama's State of the Union was good policy or good politics, but the broadness of the negative reaction excludes a lot of conceptspace, to the point that there are real world problems it's very difficult to discuss here.
In short, there's a reason why I was talking about a Political Theory Open Thread, not a Politics Open Thread.
I like the idea of a political theory thread, but before I do it, I think it's worthwhile to think about some ground rules in order for it to be productive.
Any other points I should add (particularly about voting/karma)?
Edit:
"Arguments are soldiers" is practically the definition of democracy. In theory, if my arguments are persuasive enough it will determine whether or not my neighbors or I can continue doing X or start doing Y without being fined, jailed, or killed for it. Depending on what great things I like to do or what horrible things I want to prevent my neighbors from doing, that's an awfully powerful incentive for me to risk a few minds being killed.
Now, in practice we mostly live in near-megaperson cities in multi-megaperson districts of near-gigaperson countries, whereas my above theory mostly applies to hectoperson and kiloperson tribes. But my ape brain can't quite internalize that, so the subconscious incentive remains.
But that's not even the worst of it! I try to read a range of liberal, conservative, libertarian, populist etc. news and commentary, just so that the gaps in each don't overlap so much... but it requires a conscious effort. Judging by the groupthink in reader comments on these sites, most people's behavior is the opposite of mine. Why not? Reading about how right you are is fun; reading about how wrong you are is not.
It would be very easy for new would-be L...
"Arguments are soldiers" is practically the definition of democracy.
Respectfully, that's not a correct use of the metaphor. The point is that unwillingness to disagree with other positions simply because those positions reach the desired conclusion is evidence of being mindkilled. You don't shoot soldiers on your side, but for those thinking rationally, arguments are not soldiers, so bad ideas should always be challenged.
It would be very easy for new would-be LessWrong readers to see the politics threads, jump to conclusions like "Oh, these people think they're so smart but they're actually a bunch of Blues! A wise Green like me should look elsewhere for rationality." Repeat for a few years and the average LessWrong biases really do start to skew Blue, even bad Blue-associated ideas start going unchallenged, etc.
This is a real risk, but it's worth assessing (and figuring out how to assess) how likely it is to occur.
Reading about how right you are is fun; reading about how wrong you are is not.
I don't read about how I am wrong. I only read about how other people (sometimes including my former selves) are wrong, and that's fun too.
That's an awesome idea. Maybe amend it to "downvote spam, otherwise vote everything toward 0" so a minority of politically-motivated voters can't spoil the game for everyone else?
Disagree, there are successful instances of using karma in ways inconsistent with the rest of the site.
The most important counterexample here is Will Newsome's Irrationality Game post, where voting norms were reversed: the weirdest/most irrational beliefs were upvoted the most, and the most sensible/agreeable beliefs were downvoted into invisibility. Many of the comments in that thread, especially the highest-voted, have disclaimers indicating that they operate according to a different voting metric. There is no obvious indication that anyone was confused or malicious with regard to the changed local norm.
Voting is there to encourage/discourage some kinds of comments. We don't want people to not make comments just because we disagree with their contents, so we shouldn't downvote comments for disagreement.
If someone makes a good, well-reasoned comment in favor of a position I disagree with, that merits an upvote and a response.
It might be nice to have a mechanism for voting "agree/disagree" in addition to "high quality / low quality" (as I proposed 3 years ago), but in the absence of such a mechanism we should avoid mixing our signals.
The comments that float to the top should be the highest-quality, not the ones most in line with the Lw party line.
And people should be rewarded for making high-quality comments and punished for making low-quality comments, not rewarded for expressing popular opinions and punished for expressing unpopular opinions.
Data point: during the Melbourne LessWrong meetups, discussion of politics proved (a large fraction would say significant) net negative.
For what it's worth, I read Politics is the Mind-Killer as almost the opposite of your interpretation: that politics is a mind-killer, so why would you want to drag that awful mess into examples that could otherwise be clean. ie, avoid politics at significant cost, and this includes in otherwise sterile examples.
To some extent I wonder why we'd need to avoid politically-charged examples if we were capable of actually talking about politics; I feel like if that was the case it would be Politics is the Comment-Thread-Exploder, and we'd only avoid it because a throwaway example would case a huge, well-reasoned, rational but off-topic discussion.
I downvoted those comments because they sucked. They were wrong in systematic ways indicative of a killed mind.
People who err on the side of shutting down discussion and debate are commonly known as authoritarian in nature. I don't think that's a good thing. I would expect lesswrong to err more on the side of preservation of information, and free speech absolutism, designed for ease of reading and information preservation.
Just look at that snippet. The first sentence is awkwardly worded such that I can't tell whether he's committing the bandwagon fallacy, the fallacy of appeal to nature and arguing by definition, or the bandwagon fallacy and the fundamental attribution error. The second sentence is a crude rhetorical appeal. The third sentence wraps the usual total failure to understand that policy debates should not appear one-sided within cringe-worthy phrases pretending the position advocated is nuanced and pragmatic.
I don't have a policy of downvoting political pieces. I have policy of downvoting crap, and downvoting political comments is just what tends to happen.
I think it would be interesting if we had a politics thread where we held off on proposing solutions and spoke only in facts/questions. I'm not sure it's sustainable.
"Here's a question that I'm sure you all think you know the answer to but which you're not allowed to answer," is probably a good way of making some heads explode.
I'm curious what you mean by "well-meaning troll". The way I use the word, a "troll" is someone who posts for the enjoyment of disrupting discussions, pissing people off, or wasting people's time and making them look foolish. As such, "well-meaning troll" is an oxymoron.
This probably isn't what the OP means by it, but I've encountered a number of trolls who justified, or rationalized, their trolling by claiming to act as a counter to groupthink, or as predators in the ecosystem of ideas, or as some kind of Socratic gadfly. It's up to you how much you want to trust those claims, but they are arguably altruistic and do seem consistent with the definition you offer.
The no-politics norm isn't just on LW; it's widespread. But these norms are a defensive adaptation, and I don't think they can be dropped safely.
Instead, I think we should have a designated politics day, on which all no-discussing-politics taboos are lifted in all contexts, and people who normally avoid politics are encouraged to post position papers. I think this would produce most of the benefits of talking about politics, while limiting the damage.
Several people have agreed with the idea of a politics thread and jumped to discuss implementation details, while others have expressed opposition, with both stances receiving upvotes. I think we need a poll. Response comments to this one include for, against, and karma balance.
'Politics' is a massive category, and has a disproportionate share of the important issues (relative to, say, randomly selected academic topics). In the long run (assuming there will be a long run), reinforcing the intellectual norm that politics is low-status and impossible to productively discuss is surely a bad thing if we think that it's at all important to get political questions right. It will function to make politics increasingly intellectually impoverished and divisive, as we keep seeing more and more of the calmest and sanest thinkers avert their eyes from politics and from political theory.
Because politics is so dangerous to talk about, especially high-level rationalists should be encouraged to practice their craft on it sometimes, to improve the state of the discourse, contribute important new ideas to it, and further hone their own knowledge and anti-mindkill skills.
That said, I agree that at this moment the risks of a politics open thread on LW probably outweigh the benefits. I would suggest instead an off-site politics discussion forum maintained by passionately dispassionate LWers, intended for discussants and posts with LW-like quality levels and topics. (If there ...
I only have two kinds of political discussions now:
The second is, I sincerely believe, the best way for us non-politicians to solve problems. The first is something I just kind of like doing. It's pure hate and I don't pretend it's anything else.
In general, I am extremely suspicious of claims that things are just fine the way they are. But this is one of those cases where I'm in that color.
A recent series of posts by a well-meaning troll
Doesn't this summarize lots of good reasons to keep imposing sharp costs on politics talk at Less Wrong? Looking at that guy's comment history makes me want to be even more aggressive at keeping it elsewhere.
I had been thinking about making the same suggestion. Some pros of a politics thread include:
Having a place to take the long subthreads on politically-charged topics that sometimes inevitably arise by topic drift on other posts, making LW a more pleasant experience for politics-allergic readers.
A place to test whether our rationalist skills are up to the task of discussing mind-killing topics in a non-mind-killing way.
Some would enjoy the possibility of discussing political topics in a "rational" atmosphere (truth-searching, not us-vs-them
I would rather see politics at LW done in a way that playfully respects the complications that are obvious, and ends up doing something surprising and hopefully awesome. Let me see if I can develop this a bit...
Imagine starting with a pool of people who think their brains are turbo-charged and who "enjoy the possibility of discussing political topics in a 'rational' atmosphere (truth-searching, not us-vs-them, aware of biases and fallibility, etc.)". If they're really actually rational, you'd kind of expect them to be able to do things like Aum...
It might be that my current opinion is skewed by the present political situation in my country (Italy). I haven't enough knowlegde of foreign internal politics to judge if the italian situation is typical or not, brief conversations with foreign people on the subject suggest it's worse than in the average developed countries, but not that much. To the point.
There's one main problem of talking about politics: that it doesn't work like it should work, and there's little way to collect enough information to produce a good model of the reality. In practice: po...
I don't see what the win from more discussion of politics is. Your vote doesn't count. Get over it. We have higher return things to attend to.
For what it's worth, I think that the realm of politics could be a great way to make discussions that need to be driven by truth-seeking and not tribal loyalties, give good opportunities to watch and guard against balance, and provides an opportunity to carefully calibrate confidence. I can see all the reasons why people (including me) couldn't handle it because we're not ideally rational, but if there was any discussion that gave LessWrong the ability to walk the talk and raise the sanity waterline, that discussion would be politics.
I would like there to be a politics open thread. I don't know how it would be for the health of the forum in general, but I think I would enjoy reading it.
This is not likely to be implemented easily here. When I looked at the poll it was around 20 for and 20 against having a politics open thread.
What could be done easily is start a subreddit lesswrongpoliticsbeta and if there did happen to be a great discussion on some topic ongoing there then put a pointer to it in the discussion sections here.
Summary: I propose we somewhat relax our stance on political speech on Less Wrong.
Related: The mind-killer, Mind-killer
A recent series of posts by a well-meaning troll (example) has caused me to re-examine our "no-politics" norm. I believe there has been some unintentional creep from the original intent of Politics is the Mind-Killer. In that article, Eliezer is arguing that discussions here (actually on Overcoming Bias) should not use examples from politics in discussions that are not about politics, since they distract from the lesson. Note the final paragraph:
So, the original intent was not to ban political speech altogether, but to encourage us to come up with less-charged examples where possible. If the subject you're really talking about is politics, and it relates directly to rationality, then you should be able to post about it without getting downvotes strictly because "politics is the mind-killer".
It could be that this drift is less of a community norm than I perceive, and there are just a few folks (myself included) that have taken the original message too far. If so, consider this a message just to those folks such as myself.
Of course, politics would still be off-topic in the comment threads of most posts. There should probably be a special open thread (or another forum) to which drive-by political activists can be directed, instead of simply saying "We don't talk about politics here".
David_Gerard makes a similar point here (though FWIW, I came up with this title independently).